Infectious Disease Dynamics
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My primary interest is understanding the mechanisms that govern infectious disease dynamics. My dissertation focused on understanding the role of demographic and environmental mechanisms on various childhood diseases from around the world. All figures on this page are from our 2014 Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper linking birth seasonality to childhood disease dynamics
By examining the size of the birth pulse (how strong the seasonality of births are), we were able to demonstrate that high birth amplitudes (yellow) would drive annual epidemics of measles (see inset). With lower birth amplitudes (blue), measles epidemics would occur biennially (every other year). Red arrows on the main figure show measured birth amplitudes from around the globe.
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Measles is a disease which does not have annual epidemics of similar size, it tends to be bi- or even tri-enniel - having large epidemics every two or three years. The epidemic year is called an epidemic, and the years surrounding it are called 'skip' years. We were able to demonstrate that the timing of the birth pulse could directly influence the size of measles epidemics. Having a birth peak early in the year, prior to the epidemic, increased the size of the epidemic in the epidemic year, but decreased the size of the epidemic during the 'skip' year. Alternatively, if the birth pulse occurred after the epidemic was over, the epidemic would be smaller than usual, and the 'skip' year would have increased disease incidence.
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